Somehow, Dunc’s hand was on one of her brassiered breasts through the thin fabric of the blouse. His other hand moved up inside her skirt along the silken length of her inner thigh. He was wild with desire. She wrenched herself away.
“Dunc! No! Please!”
He stopped instantly, panting. “I... I’m sorry, I...”
She came back into his arms, whispered against his throat, “It’s just that... so soon... not here... not now...”
He walked her to the door, both of them still a little breathless. She pressed against him again.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“I can’t.” She gestured at the house. “Next Friday?”
“Next Friday,” he said, then added quickly, “and Saturday.”
She laughed. “And Sunday. Good night, darling.” And she kissed him and was gone.
Dunc drove home feeling the agony and the ecstasy — ecstasy over the “darling,” agony over his case of lover’s nuts.
On Monday Dunc asked Joshua if he’d meant the immigration people might give him a hard time over hiding the Mexicans.
“Trouble I’m talking ’bout come, you be knowin’ it for sure.”
Which told him nothing. At least being shorthanded meant Dunc had to concentrate on what he was doing instead of spinning emotional and sexual fantasies about Penny all the time.
Driving home from work, Gus was in a foul mood. “I couldn’t get near Birdie last Saturday. After a whole summer of practically handing her to me on a platter, all of a sudden Hector tells me he never wants me to speak with her again.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t come at you with a shotgun.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Last week he walked into the bedroom when we were humping away.”
Dunc was amazed. “What’d he do?”
“Called her the Whore of Babylon and said ‘Excuse me’ and stalked out again.”
“You’re making it up.”
Gus made the old Boy Scout sign with two raised fingers. “Scout’s honor. I tell you, Dunc old son, I’m out of my depth. Where are the honest, virtuous virgins of St. Mary’s?”
“Maybe he heard we hid the Mexicans in the cornfield.”
“What’s this ‘we,’ white man. And anyway, what difference would it make to him?”
“I’m just saying ‘What if?’ Alejandro was at Rephaim’s on a Sunday morning and at the seminary construction site on the Monday. This weekend Hector tells you to get lost.”
Gus nodded. “And he knows we’re buddies.” Then he shrugged. “Whatever the hell reason, I’m like the guy lost the key to his girl’s apartment. Now I get no new-key.”
There was no smog, nobody could figure out why it sometimes didn’t appear. The traffic on Sepulveda was at a standstill. Somewhere ahead of them flashing lights pinpointed an accident.
Gus leaned back in the seat and crossed his hands behind his head. “I’ve got a special place I’d like to show to you and Penny, Dunc. How about I take you guys there on Sunday?”
“I’ll ask her about it — but if she comes, don’t mention Birdie. Birdie is one of her aunt’s best friends.”
Penny chose the movie on Friday night, a romantic comedy called Roman Holiday. They both were wild about it. Audrey Hepburn was like a delicate bird, and Gregory Peck had been one of Dunc’s favorite actors since he’d played the writer dying on the African veldt in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
After they had thoroughly discussed everything from Roman Holiday to Gregory Peck to Hemingway, Penny brought up Rephaim.
“I’ve given this a lot of thought, Dunc, and I still don’t think he’s involved in smuggling illegal aliens. I don’t believe in him any more than you do, but he believes in himself. Totally. And he wouldn’t profit by turning them in. Who would?”
“Well, the Immigration Service, for one.”
“Do they pay informers?”
“I doubt it, but maybe those guys have a quota to fill.”
“All right, who else profits in this whole thing?”
“Whoever gets them across the border.”
As he said it, Hector popped into his mind. But he didn’t say anything to Penny. Neither of them mentioned her impending departure, as if the infinity of time lay before them.
Dunc hadn’t ridden a horse since he was ten, when his family’d had a very sly pony named Tricksy. But Senator was a big horse, sedate and good-natured as he plodded along the winding bridle trails through the scrub brush and dusty-leaved live oaks of Griffith Park. Penny rode Yankee. She was a terrific rider. He’d have to practice so he could keep up...
Except it all ended in three weeks. Don’t think about it.
She spread a tablecloth under a smooth red-boled manzanita and gathered a bunch of wildflowers for a centerpiece. They ate fried chicken and potato salad and drank lemonade out of a thermos. Senator nudged between them to eat the bouquet.
As they returned to the stables on the northern rim of the park, Penny brought Yankee up beside Senator for a fierce saddle-to-saddle hug. “This has been one of the best days of my life!”
“Since you’re gonna own a dude ranch, I thought we’d better practice up.”
Their unsaddled horses ambled about the enclosure; Dunc mentioned Gus’s mystery location the next day.
“It’ll be fun,” said Penny. “And since he’s your friend I want to meet him before he goes off to Frank Lloyd Wright’s place in Phoenix. Do you think he could design a dude ranch house?”
“Sure, and the stables. And he specializes in outhouses.”
She patted her horse’s shoulder. “Sound good, Yankee?”
Dunc almost said it then, what had been growing in his mind. Ask her to stay, skip that last year of college; but he couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to her. Or to him, either.
A lion roared in the nearby zoo, and he thought of Hemingway’s African stories. Christ, he wanted to be a writer!
On Sunday Gus drove them down through a broad flat sprawl of little houses in South-Central L.A. east of the airport. “Just a couple of years ago this area was more white than black.”
From blocks away, they could see a strange openwork tower thrusting far above its surroundings, glinting in the noonday sun as if studded with jewels.
“What is it?” asked Penny in awe.
“A tower a guy named Watts has been building for years.”
The base of the tower was heaped with broken glass from bottles of every description — pop bottles, beer bottles, wine bottles. There was also a hand-lettered sign, “Admission, 25 cents.” Watts was a short middle-aged man who knew Gus and shook hands with him. Inside the tower, Penny and Dunc gazed up at its spires in amazement. Crazy wooden scaffolding flanked its sides.
“Concrete and broken bottles,” said Penny in surprise.
The concrete looked almost liquid, as if still dripping down the sides of the tower like candle wax. But it was totally dry. They spent over an hour there, gawking, touching.
“What a strange thing to spend your life working on,” said Penny as they headed home.
“He works alone, it just came to him that he had to do it.”
“He’s driven to it,” said Dunc, and hoped he would be that driven to writing when the time came.
That night, after Goodie and Carl had gone to bed, as they drifted back and forth together on the creaking porch swing, Dunc was surprised to hear Penny chuckle to herself.
“I was just thinking, maybe Gus isn’t the right architect for the ranch house. Even less for the stables. Can you imagine how a tower like that would spook the horses?”